Green co-leader Metiria Turei struggled to articulate her party’s position on trade in a tough interview with Guyon Espiner on Q&A this morning. She didn’t answer Espiner’s questions on whether or not the Greens supported CER or the China trade agreement.
Labour’s approach to the China agreement is unequivocal:
1. New Zealand’s long term prosperity relies on our firms successfully selling into international markets, particularly in the dynamic East and South Asian economies. We owe it to future generations.
2. China is becoming a super power. Trade (and political, diplomatic, cultural and people-to-people) engagement by NZ and other countries is a necessary part of bringing China into the international community, and fostering its commitment to international law and mulitilateralism.
3. New Zealand can and does use the access we get from our special trade and political relationship with China to raise issues of human rights.
Personally I’ve always been of the view that boycotting trade with China because they don’t share our views on labour, human rights and the environment is not tenable. Chinese workers deserve jobs just as much as workers anywhere else.
Trade liberalisation can harm (for example by reducing the policy space to protect infant industries, or forcing countries to open up sensitive sectors to foreign competition) but it can also help (for instance by getting rid of rich-country protectionism that damage the livelihoods of farmers in poor countries and New Zealand).
Not only is trade the only way that a small isolated country like New Zealand can prosper, it is also one of the most important ways the world’s poorest nations can work their way out of poverty. Trade is not inherently good or bad. It depends how the rules are written, who the winners and losers are, and how trade-offs are managed.
The challenge for New Zealand is to balance the gains we get from liberalising agricultural trade and opening up important new markets, against possible concessions that might reduce our own policy options (for instance the long expected opposition of the US to Pharmac). In the Pacific we and the Australians need to balance the gains of helping Pacific states export more, against liberalisation that could reduce the policy options of governments to protect sensitive sectors.
What do you think?
I agree with everything that you have written, but I’m iffy about the way China treats its citizens. I wish something could be done from various governments to help China move out of that way of life.
She did not fail to articulate anything, all she said was that the Greens will not support free trade if it means we cannot make our own economic desicions.
The Chinese view the period between, say, 1820 and 1978 as a short anomaly in an otherwise dominant world position. They fully expect henceforth to be around 25% 0f the global economy, as they were for millennia before the early 19th century. Their role in value chains alone will make them impossible to ignore; their role in international relations, especially in our region, simply compounds an economic inevitability. Engagement is the only practicable approach, but that gives us the leeway to assert other values that we cherish. There is no choice about engagement; there is about how.In terms of the latter, we’re doing quite well so far.
Jabba please try and stay on thread. Trevor
Its not a coincidence that both you and the rightwing blog Kiwiblog
both have criticised Meteria today
Thats because you and them are both two sides of the same coin
The Greens are not part of that left right continuum, growth at all costs,lets just argue how to divide up the cake
The Greens care about the ingredients that make up that cake
Those ingredients include Sustainability and Social Justice, you guys obviously do not.
Fair trade is much much more important then Free Trade
The Greens offer a different way then the typical “fight over resource distribution they are the party of SUSTAINABILITY
The Greens offer a much needed alternative way of thinking about solving and dealing with the countries and worlds problems
I agree Thomas. I support Labour because of their social policy. But I am a member of the Green Party because they do not want continued economic expansion in a finite world, which when you think about it is madness.
I care about fair trade, but I can also see where Twyford is coming from. I like Winter’s comment about how trading with China may give us leeway to assert other values
Let’s hope that China will benefit more than economically. 
@jabba – howdy
Thomas,
Have a look into some economics mate, barriers to trade make everyone worse off. Period. Thats why its one area that the two major parties agree on.
Now I’ve just seen that the Nats are keeping the tariffs in place till at least 2015. Its madness. Will the Labour party point this out?
Which won’t last long due to their absolute advantages over us. More people, more resources, more research and development and, finally but most significantly, the market is at their doorstep and not 10000 miles away. Peak Oil has already occurred and this means that exporting from NZ into those markets is going to become economically infeasible.
Greg, go read the Dahlem Report.
I don’t think China is “becoming a super power”. It’s already there.
My concern is how we avoid the race to the bottom?If we force our industries to compete against those in countries which don’t have to deal with pesky things like unions and democracy, we can only compete if we accept comparable conditions.Seems like many businesses have already decided NZ workers won’t, and have shifted offshore to places where the regimes will happily allow exploitation of the serfs?How many participants in “free trade” actually get to experience freedom?
[...] Twyford blogs on trade: Green co-leader Metiria Turei struggled to articulate her party’s position on trade in a tough [...]
@ Dave Rutherford – We can never compete with China on labour costs. We shouldn’t try to. We are still paying the price of National’s partly successful efforts to turn us into a low wage economy in the 1990s. It’s a dead end.
The trick is to concentrate on high value exports where we have an advantage. That is what Labour’s Fast Forward Fund was designed to encourage: a public-private partnership investment fund to develop and commercialise technologies coming out of our agricultural sector. Check out Rod Oram’s column in yesterday’s Sunday Star Times on clean technologies.
@ thomas – You have the wrong end of the stick mate. Labour stands for fair trade. We want to see a conclusion to the Doha WTO round that gives developing countries a fair go by opening up rich country markets, while leaving the poorest countries the policy space to protect sensitive sectors and infant industries. In the Pacific we need to work carefully with island states to make sure that trade agreements like Pacer open up economic opportunities without making small economies more vulnerable. We also stand for sustainability. Labour’s ETS is looking quite good in retrospect dont you think?
The Doha WTO round of negotiations is going to help poor countries? Yeah right!
I think any politician in Labour who pretends they support fair trade is saying a straight-up lie. Labour has been rigidly committed to a neo-liberal ideological agenda on trade for two decades, and during the last two Labour terms, there was not a single move to intelligently defend even the most promising infant industries in New Zealand through the lowest of tariffs.
Labour should be honest about their trade agenda, and not sugercoat it with easy words like ‘fair trade’ and talk of ‘balance’.
Hi Oliver. The Doha round could help poor countries if it delivered on the original promise of re-balancing decades of unfair trade rules. The current drafts are a long way from reflecting that development agenda. And that is why there is a stalemate.
Btw which promising infant industries would you like to have protected with tariffs? I actually think the big challenge we have is not protecting infant industries in our domestic market. It is growing firms that can a. export at scale and b. grow big without getting snapped up by overseas firms.
How’s Singapore Oliver?
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/09/metaphysics-of-money.html
That’s an easy one – ban foreign ownership.
How can you ban foreign ownership and support an international pension fund, or are you referring to foreign control?
Overseas ownership is at least a part consequence of NZ falling wealth in GDP terms (need I list 2000 to 2009 OECD rankings) and our foreign source of debt. Neither of these were addressed by the labour govt 99-08 or any other in my living memory. But no one wants to start!
@ Herodotus – I certainly wasn’t suggesting banning foreign ownership. But we do need to work out how we can grow big successful firms that can operate in global markets and stay in NZ ownership. Stronger capital markets? Better savings? A shift in our business culture away from short term shareholder gain towards longer term social gain?
Phil- Tinkering around the fringes will do no more to save the HMNZS Kiwiland than it did for the Titanic. There needs to be bold radical plan AND implimentation. The last 9 years had the potential to do something but what was achieved was tinkering. Nothing structural has changed, the best opportunity at the time was the Knowledge Economy but there was no committment. For the next 10 years or more we will be suffering the consequences of our lack or preparedness for the recession.
Hamstringing ourself re the way we are dealing with CO2 just adds to the difficulty. But that is another topic!
And the building bubble that could re inflate will just hide things.
There’s no need for any business to sell to foreign owners so that they can operate in overseas markets. All they have to do is employ some local marketers and advertisers. Given these truths there must be some other reason for our businesses to sell out and I suspect it’s more to do with the woohoo, I have $x,000,000 in my pocket phenomenon than anything else.
If you want to keep successful NZ business in NZ hands then you’re going to have to ban foreign ownership. Which we should be doing anyway as it’s bad for the economy (we lose the return to capital). I’m not against free-trade but it needs to be trade in tradeable items and not ownership.
“But we do need to work out how we can grow big successful firms that can operate in global markets and stay in NZ ownership. Stronger capital markets? Better savings? A shift in our business culture away from short term shareholder gain towards longer term social gain?”
Phil, the answer to these questions were answered in 1759, “Laissez-nous faire”
Reading the paper online today,saw an article on free trade with china and how an overseas owned supermarket in nz is buying in fish fillets from china.So what you say,but the fish was caught in nz exported whole to china where it was filleted and sent back to nz to be sold here.That to me is not free trade but dumb trade that benefits the overseas owned supermarket that siphons millions of our dollars out of our economy and it benefits the chinese and leaves us kiwis a laughing stock.I guess its called free trade because we give the profits away for free and we trade our economy for a life of poverty while politicians run around the globe hell bent on giving away the last bit of our country to foreigners.How dumb are we.Politicians you shame me when i read about this kind of thing.Wake up.